The woman I thought I had married would never have done what I was watching my wife do.

Which meant that the woman I thought I had married had never existed — that she had been a performance, staged for my benefit, maintained for six years, for as long as I was useful, and that the person on that footage, the one saying that she would decide when my mother had earned her food, was not a version of my wife that grief and anger had produced.

She was the real person, revealed.

And there is a strange, cold mercy in that kind of revelation.

You do not have to grieve the loss of a real thing, because you learn it was never real.

You need only grieve your own blindness, which is its own grief, but a cleaner one.